Following the rival, Nvidia starts using finer manufacturing process. After G92, it is G200’s turn that has finally arrived. Today we are going to discuss the first Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 model using 55nm graphics core modification thatw e managed to get our hands on.

Performance in Third-Person 3D Shooters

Dead Space

Dead Space confirms our point that the higher clock rates cannot make up for the lack of ALUs, TMUs and raster back-ends: the overclocked EVGA is 2-5% ahead of the GeForce GTX 280 in average frame rate but its bottom speed is no higher than at the default frequencies. Moreover, overclocking is not enough at 2560x1600 where the GeForce GTX 280 goes ahead again. The game has modest system requirements while the cards are very fast. The mentioned differences cannot be spotted with a naked eye.

Devil May Cry 4

The EVGA card is faster than the GeForce GTX 280 in terms of average speed but has the same bottom speed. The only exception is the resolution of 2560x1600 where the EVGA delivers a higher bottom speed than the flagship of the GeForce series.

Grand Theft Auto IV

The game does not allow to set Texture Quality at higher than Medium for graphics cards with 512MB of graphics memory whereas the maximum safe value of View Distance is 32. So, we had to select the mentioned values for our test. The other options were set at their maximums. The game’s built-in benchmarking options do not provide information about the bottom speed, so there is no such info in the diagrams.

It is only at 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 that we can see any difference between the tested graphics cards. The overclocked EVGA delivers the same average frame rate as the GeForce GTX 280 at 1920x1200 and even overtakes the latter at 2560x1600. It also beats the Radeon HD 4850 X2. Judging by the results of the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, the game prefers Nvidia’s GPUs that have a lot of texture processors.

Starting from our next review we will use other settings in this game, oriented at graphics cards with 896MB or more memory.